“Our ability to draw upon both internal and external sources of innovation, from IBM Research to acquisitions like AlchemyAPI, remain central to our strategy of bringing Watson to new markets, industries and regions,” said Mike Rhodin, senior VP at IBM Watson.

Founder and CEO of AlchemyAPI, Elliot Turner said: “We founded AlchemyAPI with the mission of democratizing deep learning artificial intelligence for real-time analysis of unstructured data and giving the world’s developers access to these capabilities to innovate. As part of IBM’s Watson unit, we have an infinite opportunity to further that goal.”

As a direct outcome of the acquisition AlchemyAPI’s deep learning technology will be integrated into the core Watson platform. This will enhance Watson’s ability to ‘quickly identify hierarchies and understand relationships within large volume data sets,’ explains the news release making the announcement.

Watson will be able to “ingest, train and learn the “long-tail” of various data domains – including general business and target industries, as well as address the need to manage constantly evolving ontologies.”

This acquisition also makes available to the Watson community a host of cognitive computing APIs like language analysis APIs to address new types of text and visual recognition and the ability to automatically detect, label and extract important details from image data.

Furthermore,40,000 developers who had been working with AlchemyAPI will now be part of the Watson ecosystem. The details of the acquisition remain undisclosed. This move is in line with heavyweights like Facebook and Google who have made investments in deep learning earlier.